Life, Magic and Depression
by mapleleaf024
Summary: A one-shot story about Hermione's life before Hogwarts


She had wanted to run away for as long as she could remember.  When she was three, she endeavoured to get lost in her backyard.  She would raid the fridge, take her best friend Laura with her and get "lost."  After about three hours, they would come back in and play with Laura's Beanie Babies. 

When she was five and her family moved to London, she could not get lost anymore.  But at school, she fashioned elaborate schemes to run away.  After, though, she thought that she would get her parents to pay for university first.  It never occurred to her that she would be out of the house by then anyways.  She had a best friend then, Brie.  They did everything together.

After the summer of senior kindergarten - Grade One, she forgot all about Brie and never thought of her again.  She worshiped her teacher, and under that teacher's influence, she became best friends with a girl named Tiffany.  Inseparable didn't even begin to describe them.  Their two other close friends were Lauren and Marie.  Little did she know that Tiffany, in actuality, was not fond of her, and that Lauren was forming a plan to stop her friendship with Tiffany.  Lauren wanted Tiffany to herself. 

Lauren's plan took until Grade two to be implemented, but when it was, she was devastated.  She had scarcely forsaken her scheme to run away, and subsequently Lauren got mad at her.  She now believed that life was not of any importance, and she unknowingly planted the seed of doubt in her mind that life, as a rule, was not fair. She became even more despondent than before.   This affected all around her.  There was an air of gloom over the whole neighbourhood.  She didn't realise it at the time, but that was the first indication of her magic powers.

Her melancholy developed even more as the year progressed.  She thought that this was palpably the worst year of her life.  Little did she know what lay ahead of her. 

She was an intellectual girl, and was not troubled to express her opinions.  This was a characteristic that she would profoundly lament in her later years. 

In grade three, she became reacquainted with Brie.  They became greatest of friends, and stayed that way until Grade 5.  At that time, she and Brie started growing apart.  Brie was interested in boys, and she unquestionably was not!  She started to think of running away again.  Her friend Elizabeth, whom she had walked home with for over 2 years, wasn't very pleasant to her, so she started walking home by a different route, going the lengthy way instead of the shorter route which brought her past Elizabeth's residence.  She also started thinking more of running away yet again.  Her friends were leaving her high and dry and she did not consider anyone trustworthy, especially herself. 

In Grade six, she started thinking more about depression than anything else.  She had read a book on it, and she recognized that she had clinical depression.  She still did not trust herself, or her friends.  The only physical evidence of her depression was that, in the last sentence of a character study assignment, she wrote, "On the whole, this woman is a fabulous woman, who, like all of us, when the world falls on her shoulders, can't support it too well."  She obviously thought that the world had dropped on her shoulders, and she was having a lot of trouble bearing her burden.  This weight on her became even harder to bear as her friend discarded her for a more popular girl in her grade.

She was very intelligent, and the school had recognised her as gifted in Grade 2.  As a result of this, she was not well liked in her grade because she was intelligent.  Her teachers all favoured her, and that was not a very satisfactory thing.

She had always hated her looks.  She criticized them every chance she got.  Her teeth, her hair, her nose, everything. 

Her Grade six teacher, Mr. Jim, liked her, but not sufficiently enough to give her It-Win stickers, a form of merit, at the conclusion of her Grade six year.  She was horrified at this, and went off to her cottage in despair.  Every summer, her family would fly to Canada to stay at the cottage that they owned.  On the plane ride over, the turbulence was crazy.  It was the worst flight of her life.

Her cottage was enjoyable to every one who stayed there and she loved it lots.  Her friend Chelsea tried to cheer her up, but nevertheless she scarcely made it through the first month of, as she called it, anguish.  Once, when she was horribly despondent, a boat crashed on the rocks outside of her cottage.  In August, however, her cousin Warren came up to his cottage after one month of camp.   By then her depression was so horrendous that it felt like there was an enormously heavy weight on her heart that was trying to push it into an immense, never-ending black pit.  She was teetering on the brink of this chasm, and if she fell in, it would mean suicide. She would have fallen into this chasm, if Warren had not showed up at that time and made her so ashamed to be depressed that she snapped out of it quite quickly.  She enjoyed two blissful weeks of peace with herself and the world, but than something unbearable happened. 

She got sent to summer camp.   That may not sound like a horrible thing, but to her it was.  There was always that persistent possibility of a recurrence of her symptoms. 

At Glenn Burks Camp, she did have a recurrence of her symptoms, namely her anxiety, self-mutilation, withdrawal and weight loss.  She was seriously thinking of committing suicide.  She had the means, Reactine pills that she took for her allergies, and she sincerely thought that she had no friends. She had heard the other campers in her cabin talking about her.  Christine stuck up for her, although she had only met each other 10 hours ago.  She never told Christine this, but she knew that Christine was her closest friend in that cabin. Even her other friend, Chelsea, whom she had known since birth, voiced opinions against her.

On the canoe trip that their section took every summer, she was most commonly found in her tent, weeping.  On the first night of the canoe trip, she went to her tent, pretending that she was fatigued, and wept for an hour.  At the end of that hour, Christine came in and asked her what was wrong.  Foolishly, she told Christine that nobody liked her, and she didn't have any friends.  Christine immediately went and told Chelsea, her "best friend."  Chelsea immediately came into her tent and asked what was wrong.  She said nothing, but Christine had already told Chelsea the story.  Chelsea said that her views were all wrong, and that everyone liked her, but she knew Chelsea was lying.  It was something about the indirect glances, and the lack of eye contact.  That was how the first two people came to know her secret.

She was about to take her life herself when, mercifully, camp ended.  She went back to her cottage, and her cousin Warren cheered her up once again.  She loved her cousin Warren more than she liked any of her other cousins.  Warren was special to her like no other was.  She went to visit his family whenever possible, and always enjoyed it, for her Aunt Sue was a superb cook, and Warren's brother, Brian, was very nice to her.  She never felt depressed when she was with Brian and Warren.    

After the summer, school started.  She was in Mr. Michel's class, and he was the best teacher she'd ever had.  Only one of her friends, Dominique, was still in her class, but there was a group of some other generally unpopular girls in her class, including Tiffany and Lauren.  Marie had long since moved away.  She became re-acquainted with Tiffany and Lauren, and almost became friends with the rest of the group, which in included the smartest person in the grade, Isadora. 

The depression continued, with frequent outbursts in the form of writing little notes to herself and putting them in her pencil case.  Mathew, the most atrocious boy in the grade, discovered these notes.  She was working on her family studies pillow, and she came back to her table to get a needle, and what did she find, but Mathew there, reading her first note!!!  This note was entitled "Ways to kill myself."  Chrissie, who also sat at her table, read the note as well.  She got very angry with Mathew and Chrissie and became mortified at herself for writing the notes.  That was how the third and fourth people came to know parts of her secret.

She vehemently hated Isadora, because she was competition for the smartest girl in the class.  She'd never had _competition_ before!  But then again, she really liked Isadora, because Isadora was always very pleasant to her.  Isadora was really smart, and she would always compete with Isadora for the best marks in the class.  After school was a different story.  Her and Isadora ate sugar together and did almost everything together.  One day, Isadora and her were sitting together in Math class.  When she sounded particularly ecstatic at one thing that she knew before Isadora, Isadora called her stuck-up.  It was only a muttered insult, but it cut right to the heart of this girl.  She had considered Isadora to be a friend.  Her eyes filled with tears and she couldn't speak for about a minute.

Sometimes the truly meant, minor insults uttered in an outburst by a friend can hurt more than a vociferously shouted, ghastly insult by an enemy.  She swiftly became friends with Isadora again, after a long talk.  They continued on where they had left off, and, if anything, became even closer.  They became close enough that she trusted Isadora with parts of her secret, namely the part that related to committing suicide.  

That year, she received a parchment letter from the Hogwarts academy of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  It informed her that she had magical powers.  Suddenly, all of the little incidents that had happened over her life began to make sense. 

Her life drastically changed when she began attending Hogwarts.  She made two good friends, Ron and Harry, who helped her almost as much as Warren did.  She was widely recognized as the smartest witch in the history of Hogwarts and her life had meaning.

Then she stumbled on to a book called "The Ron Ellis Story" in her research on magic.  She read it, and became aware of how serious her depression really was.  Just as Warren gave her strength, that book gave her hope for her life and explained to her all of its potential. The book made her evaluate her friendships, and what being a friend really means.  She realized that life was a gift, not simply life, and that she had almost thrown that gift away.  Hermione Granger was finally recognized as a worthwhile person in the eyes of most that knew her.

**A/N: Based loosely on an autobiographical account of my life that I wrote when I was 13. **

**Read the original on Fictionpress.net username mapleleaf024 story called Story of a Girl.**

**Please review.**

**I don't own Hermione, Harry, Ron, or Hogwarts.**


End file.
